Urethane Cement Flooring Thickness Is The Temperature Rating
This is the urethane cement flooring specification bought wrong most often, and it is worth understanding before any quotes get compared.
Urethane cement flooring is trowelled on at somewhere between three sixteenths and half an inch. That thickness is not a finish tolerance, it is what sets the temperature the floor will survive. At around a quarter of an inch the manufacturer rating is roughly 80 degrees Celsius. Take it to three eighths and the rating passes 120, which is the range full steam cleaning needs, with brief spillages tolerated higher still.
Thicker urethane cement flooring absorbs the heat gradient and gives the temperature time to dissipate before it reaches the bond with the concrete. A plant that specifies the thin build to save money has bought urethane cement flooring rated below its own cleaning routine, and it will debond.
Why Epoxy Fails In A Washdown Room And Urethane Cement Flooring Does Not
The mechanism is thermal expansion, and it can be checked on any data sheet in a minute.
Epoxy grows about three times more than concrete for a given temperature change. Hot water arrives, the coating strains to grow beyond what the slab permits, and every bit of that shear ends up at the bond. Urethane cement flooring has a thermal expansion coefficient close to that of concrete, so it moves with the slab and the stress never develops. It also stands up to the organic acids food production generates, which attack epoxy resins directly.
There is a second advantage that matters on new construction. Urethane cement flooring can be laid on concrete with a high moisture content, within days of the pour in some cases, where an epoxy system would still be waiting a month or more for the slab to dry out.
Hard Water Makes The Cleaning Chemistry Harsher In Oxford County
Oxford County water is exceptionally hard, and that changes what urethane cement flooring in a washdown room has to tolerate.
The county measured raw water hardness in Woodstock at 324 to 693 milligrams per litre and Ingersoll at 355 to 495, against the 180 that gets water called very hard. That is the Devonian limestone under the region dissolving into the groundwater. In a plant it means mineral scale laid down at every washdown and cleaning crews reaching for stronger caustic chemistry to shift it. The floor carries a chemical load well beyond what the recipe alone suggests, which is why we specify urethane cement flooring against the cleaning regime rather than the product.
